Know When to Rewrite
Today we arrive at a cold, hard truth about revisions. Sometimes all the revisions in the world won't fix a bad scene, a bad chapter or a bad 100 pages. For the sake of your story, sometimes there is no choice but to rewrite those portions of your book.
If the idea makes you shudder, consider this. Rewriting can actually be a faster fix than revising, assuming you have a firm idea of how your problematic scene or chapter should have been written in the first place. Revising requires the stop-and-go pace of cutting out frequent lines or paragraphs, then rethinking how to connect the gap in a way that protects the flow of the words but gives different information then the original. You are calling on your writer instincts hand-in-hand with your editor instincts and, let’s be honest, those are two very different facets of any writer. You have to make these two work together on page after page after page of your story and that can be a huge challenge.
When you opt to rewrite, you can shove aside your internal editor for awhile and simply re-imagine the scene from the beginning. This can be creatively freeing!
Re-plotting Your first task in rewriting a scene or section of the book is re-plotting. How has your story gotten off track in this portion of the book and what can you do to correct the problem? Did your story go off on a tangent because you were fascinated with a secondary character and let them dominate a scene? Did you force your characters into making a decision dictated by your synopsis that—upon later reflection—really didn’t make sense for the kinds of people they are?
With a concrete plot objective in mind, begin rewriting the scene, using the last line of the scene before it as a story prompt. Try writing the new material on a laptop or word processor away from your main computer or perhaps open a blank document and work there. This mental separation from the larger story might help shut down the internal editor and let the new scene stand on its own feet.
Remember where and how you need to finish your scene with an endnote on your fresh document that reminds you where to pick up with your existing text. Keep the plot and conflict goals of the new scene in mind throughout and consider using the rewrite as an opportunity to strengthen small points of the story that need tweaking in the manuscript overall. For example, if your internal editor has determined the story belongs more to the hero than the heroine, try to strengthen your heroine in the new scene so that you’re combating two problems with the rewritten material.
Likewise, if you’re attempting to speed up the overall pace of your story in the revision, let this rewritten scene accomplish that goal (in part) by infusing the new material with more momentum.
Some key notes on re-plotting—or any plotting, for that matter!—include the following:
1—Give your main character a goal and an obstacle. Make the threat to that goal clear and pressing.
2—Create a ticking time bomb. Even in a romance with no suspense element, there needs to be a sense that the problem has to be faced and addressed soon or there will be consequences. Impose a deadline for conflict resolution. This gives the novel a wonderful sense of pacing.
3—Create stakes and raise them continually. Establish a threat to the character (might be to their life, their love, their home and happiness) that only grows bigger and more dramatic through the course of the novel. Problems get worse before they get better.
4—Develop character growth. Your characters change during the course of the novel and it’s this change that enables them to overcome the conflict by the last page. What is your main character capable of at the end of the book that they weren’t capable of at the beginning? Know why and how this growth occurred and show us that growth in action through the hero’s journey.
5—Give us a black moment that makes us fear for the resolution of the conflict. There needs to be a story disaster that is a point of no-return for the character.
6—Develop a resolution that is derived from character growth and provides a satisfying ending.
Checking over your whole book—as well as your rewritten material—for these principles will help ensure your story delivers with a bang.
Re-characterizing If you want to change any significant aspects of your main characters in a revision, rewriting can be your best option. Whereas deepening a character’s motivation might not require any rewriting, changing that character’s profession, backstory or key traits are tasks best tackled with completely new material.
Why not just tweak the smaller parts you want to change? As tempting as that may sound, the approach could cost you a great deal of character continuity. If nothing else, at least re-work that character’s first scene, the one that is so influential in how a reader will feel about your character for the whole course of the book. Be sure to scrub out all traces of old character traits no longer applicable to the figure and take your time setting up the character’s new persona.
Weaving in the New Stitching together the old scenes with the new can be a laborious task as there are several logistical points to handle with care. Re-written scenes in a book are the most likely to break the sense of story chronology or to give us a jarring view of our characters because the author has had more time to get to know the character fully and might inadvertently introduce readers to a slightly different version of the character with their knowledge of the full story in mind. In other words, you’ve seen your hero combat the black moment and commit to change at the end of the book by the time you go back to add a scene to chapter three. Be careful you are writing the character as readers know him at the beginning of the book and not as you know him at the end. While it’s great to foreshadow plot elements or character flaws, it’s not acceptable to let a different version of your character walk into a few select scenes for rewriting. Be consistent.
Watch Your Timeline Be careful of your book’s timeline as you revise and rewrite new sections. It’s easy to get your days tangled up at this stage and readers will be quick to point out any chronological glitches. It might be useful to write up a timeline for your book overall so you can see the timeframe you have for any additions added in the middle.
Also, be careful juggling things like time of day and weather so that you don’t have a twilight scene take place when it should be morning or vice versa.
Reader Orientation Another item to consider in your rewrites is character point of view and scene setting. If you’re crafting a completely new scene, be aware of whose point of view the deleted scene was in. If you are giving the new scene to a different character, will it give too much screen time to one character in particular? This is something you weigh carefully during your first draft but might be less aware of in a scene written out of context.
Next, firmly establish a sense of place and time at the opening of your new scene to prevent the sense of your characters’ being talking heads on a page. They need to be fully-fleshed out in their environment to maintain the story flow.
Use Your All-Seeing Eye While you don’t want to write your character too differently in a revamped scene, you do want to use your knowledge of the full book to plant extra details you might not have been aware of on your first draft. If you discovered your hero was color blind midway through the book, you can use a rewritten scene in the early chapters to plant a clue. Have him squint at the heroine’s new dress that she’s excited about, a small action we see in her point of view, but one which supports a facet of him we unearth later.
If your story incorporates suspense elements, the rewritten scenes are good opportunities to mention items the hero uses to defeat the villain later in the book. Does he drop a chandelier on a villain’s head? Be sure to let us see the chandelier and make us aware that the butler has said it needs repairs. In other words, use the rewrites as opportunities to throw juicy tidbits to the reader so the ending is all the more satisfying.
Faster Than You Think Sometimes rewriting is the most efficient way to revise. Rather than nitpicking a scene to death to make it work, try using the delete key (while always copying and pasting the deleted material to a notes file). Be inspired by the blank page and the fact that you don’t have to fix anything. You simply have to write a new scene and you have the benefit of doing excellent “prewriting” work that will inform the work and keep your keys flying. For truly problematic areas, this is often the quickest, smartest solution. Plug in a stronger chapter that will sparkle with the skill of a writer who knows her story inside and out!